The Arks
Bailiwick of the Delves the Arks is one raised almost entirely without the aid, or even the wishes, of the Troges. Before the Vague Revolution then hereabouts the settlement was a shambles, a spill between what are now the bailiwicks of William Lane and the Needs. Where here for centuries the Troges had cast down rubble and the refuse from their works people had begun to live, and indeed here a greater proportion of the Vague Revolution was fermented. Here where the ground was crossed by twenty-three arches for the grand bridge between the Grails and the upper reaches of the Needs, much that was built up was between and under each. Then a place more resembling what is now William Lane in culture it all ended when during the Vague Revolution that great bridge was damaged by black powder. Such should not have seen its destruction but by some terrible chance the damage came at three of the very points where the weight of the bridge itself saw it then fall. It took several days, days where the young Parquet sheltered and shuddered from the cacophony of the bridges death, where clouds of dust and ruin spread across the Delves and saw so many flee to invade the Looms in numbers the actual Vague Revolution itself could never have dared dream of. Drouais made much of this. Ignoring as inconvenient that the destruction came at the hand of the revolution he made of it a symbol and began to refer to the ruins and the stumps of the bridge as the Arc Du Peuple. This was derided by his rivals, but the name stuck for that below, or at least as the Purple Arks for a time before, in the manner of the lingua franca, it was more simply the Arks that stuck. The spirit of the people of Parquet is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the Arks. Newly made citizens, there was for a time a drive amongst them, and in the Arks at least some part of that remains. The rubble and colossal stones of coralline made for easy building materials and here people built. Not by the talent of the Troges but by their own will, and here something of a town was raised and still to this day continues to be so. All of which would demonstrate an admirable and consistent desire to better oneself, to make a life by one’s own hand but the reason for the near constant building is more prosaically two fold; the rubble and ruins below the arches are far from stable and often slide, fall, collapse under their own weight or more often the second reason in that here as nearly everywhere in Parquet the citizens are not very good builders. Few knowledgeable in architecture and oddly more in the actual labour and skills are given up by the sea. Those born to Parquet are cushioned by the Troges and have never truly needed to learn. What seems a simple task intellectually is found to be far from it in practise, and so the Arks creek layer upon successive layer. Stouter and more successful buildings sit between or are leant against by the sliding, more ramshackle efforts. Sturdier buildings have even become streets and lanes making odd bridges over others that shelter beneath. The citizens simply do not have the understanding of the coralline to make it, and even those few that know of stone find it, despite appearances, to be quite something else entirely. It is not that the Arks are persistently falling down (though there is something of a lazy crumble) so much that they are ever about to, and a collapse is not altogether unknown. Nearly everyone in the Arks was either given up by the sea and has made their reluctant peace here, or their parents did and here they grew. And determinedly so, for the Arks set themselves somewhat apart from Parquet, here more than anywhere people try and live their lives, go to their labour, make a home, even where they are blessed to raise children. The Arks might be a boon for Parquet if in setting themselves apart the people of the Arks did not also consider their selves better than most. In a nation with few laws they are law-abiding, as such. In a land of new wonders, or relative peace, and for many a fresh life there is a thick vein of never quite forgetting the wider world. Here are those that still foster the religions of the wider world. Here are they that try and recall, or even recreate, what they increasingly now see through a very long and distorted lens that life they once, to their blurring memories, enjoyed. Here preachers would be powerful if they did not so compete, so loath one another. And here in that quiet, dangerous way agitators can find fertile fields. For the most prominent of the agitators are adept at telling people what they want to hear, and then having gained their ear let them know what it is what they should think. The Troges are often reviled, the ghul vilified, the picaroon scorned, the quality disapproved of. The flavour of Puritanism can be tasted in the wet air of the Arks and people, if often outwardly upright, it can hardly be missed that here are more game birds, here the beatings are not spoken of and often unseen, and drink and ruin remain (if bound up and prettified by being ignored when unseen). Because whilst the citizens of the Arks do preserve much of what they believe to have been the wider world that includes its ills, its jealousies, its guilt and its hypocrisy. If the rookeries of the wider world are not truly found in Parquet then they remain in the souls of the people of the Arks. There is theft, and a Jack, and his pandy, and worse things still. And the monsters of the Arks are citizens that will nod politely and keep their horns hidden even from themselves. In the Arks the best and the worst of people can be found, and if the finding might be a harder hunt then it is just because it conceals itself more artfully in less obvious shadows. The new generation here are as overwhelmingly British or Jonathan as that at the time of the Vague Revolution were French, Dutch and Italian. Doubtless as time goes quickly by and the nature of Parquet flows true the Grails and the Looms will become more British and elsewhere a new sea-faring nation will rise and populate the Arks. The Jack Caleb Dycker is the very soul of the Arks. Dressed almost dandily in his smart, sober attire and very formal he is just as cruel as his peers. Not because his people deserve it but because it is good for them and for some with the wit to see it that is so very much worse. Yet Dycker is treated like a gentleman, a worthy figure, one who protects the citizens of the Arks and most commonly from the Samsons. The Samsons that live atop a number of the broken arches are outcasts and rogues who raid and prey upon others as if they were a bailiwick themselves. Yet, whilst the Grails is more likely to be flattered by the milicio (and always better frequented by picaroon bolstered and wealthy enough to fight) it is there that Samsons most often strike. But still here too, and if less than the Grails still the citizens fear to spy a trailing rope whip up to show where Samsons have descended. Ark culture is not such that people will not hurry towards a scream or investigate a scuffle, and so they fear because just as it is none of their business if someone is caught up in unpleasantness, then so too do they know that it is no one but theirs if misfortune befalls them. But there is a life in the Arks. People labour (if often elsewhere), there are enterprises and shops, there are friendly houses and associations, there is drive and a jealous sort of vigour, and there is the passion of the agitator and the sense still that hard work and a good reputation will provide their own reward. More often than otherwise those that succumb to the spirit of the Arks remain in it, growing old here, even if just as commonly their children born to Parquet do not. Burrowed into and a part of one of the arch stumps Jerzy’s can be found. The café where Drouais and his ilk plotted, and which saw the last real fight using black powder when he sent the milicio after one of his former confederates in the fresh days of the new Parquet. Similarly, the stout meeting house for the Quakers is in the Arks, from which Sarah and Mary Tucker set out across Parquet. Without the bridge the formerly dank and ill lit area is now a bailiwick that, whilst still shadowed by the Grails and the stumps themselves, is populace. William Lane that borders it might stink of the scuppers, but the Arks stinks of people. Nowhere in Parquet smells as bad as any city in the wider world but the Arks, recalling and missing so much, works hard to come somewhere close. Sweat and sourness, shit and pettiness thicken the air. Journeying from Port Mercy into the Delves it is the Arks that first reminds the naif of the wider world, and mostly with the nostrils. Arrayed in lanes and levels, more built upon the often (but never entirely) collapsed before, the bailiwick ramps up towards the stumps, as if made of cards, it has been knocked. Yet the Arks do not rely on the Looms entirely for their light for here are more medusa than anywhere else, for before the Arks the area was the route to Port Mercy from high above, and through the Grails, and then it was a place where life festered and prospered. And still that means the medusa. They spawn in the lowest, wettest parts, those mostly uninhabited, but rise and in many species live only in these their ancient environment. Many are luminous, and the diaphanous medusa (what more recently in the wider world the English might call jellyfish, medusa being both Latin and Spanish it is the Parquet word) too have adapted to the Arks. The more dangerous either ride at certain times of the year or are rare due to culls. They cluster so that even at night there are pools of wet light dappling the Arks, and in their regular haunts, so that the buildings have grown such to make use of their benefit. There may be as many snails as everywhere in the Delves but the medusa, feeding most often on spiders and insects, such vermin are not quite the pest as elsewhere. So much so that those spiders kept for the seta are caged, kept away from the medusa, more as pets and industry than in their fellow bailiwicks. The Arks then, first of the Delves from Port Mercy and a jumble. Both enterprising and puritanical, the people thinking themselves both starkly independent whilst being so concerned with appearances. The closest to the wider world in culture, yet a wider world seen through a very long and well-painted telescope, but a bailiwick of people, not Troges. Where much is made by the hand of man, and much falls down, giving them ample opportunity to do so.